How to get Z-distance (not depth) from camera to object for every pixel in the frame?

Question

I am currently doing a computer vision task and got stuck on the following problem. I need ground truth values for my sequence. I have a nice sequence where the camera moves trough my scene and captures the RGB-frames. Now, I need a corresponding frame for every RGB-frame, but instead of the RGB-values it should store the distance. I know, that you can get the total depth (euclidean distance from camera to real-world-object) by connecting the 'Depth'-output of the Render Layer Node to a File Output Node in the Compositing workspace using the EXR file format. But I just need the Z-component of the distance to the camera and I don't want to convert it afterwards with the camera parameters (already did it, but I need a cleaner workflow).

I stumbled upon this function: bpy_extras.view3d_utils.region_2d_to_location_3d , but could find almost nothing about how to use it properly. I don't know what I should give it as input. Has anyone a solution or maybe already used the function and can explain me how i would use it in the default Blender setup (just a Cube, Camera and Light) and if it does what I expect it to do (giving the x,y,z and then I can strip the unnecessary information)? I already tried using the world_to_camera_view function, but this only works for object-parameters like vertices and not for the whole surface to create a dense map. I also know, that you can render the scene with a Cycles material to store x,y,z in the RGB-channels, but there you only get world-coordinates and you have to change the materials after you rendered the real sequence. I really need just a frame with z-distance to the camera for every pixel in the frame.

I would be really grateful if someone could help me, because I've been trying to do that for days now. I posted the same question before, here at stackoverflow, but I thought it might be more suitable to post it here now, because it is blender-specific.

EDIT: I am interested in getting for every pixel on my image plane. The way I am doing it currently is, that I get the depth for from Blender and then I use the Thales' theorem to get with my known focal length and the known principal point. My problem with this solution is, that I don't get the actual true values for because of the discrete pixels. A simple plane that is parallel to my camera (image plane) at the z-distance of 10 metres will give me values between 9.98 and 10.02 metres after my current approach.

Answer 1

The Camera Data node will give you a shader which will return the values you are looking for in the pixels of an image.

Here's a calibration scene. The camera is at World (0,0,1), the planes are at Z = 0, 1, 2, 3.

With this shader set-up, the pixel-value will be Z-component of the vector from the camera to the shading-point. ( You could also have shaded the planes using the Texture Coordinate node, in the Object space of the camera, and taken the Z component of that)

The nodes in the 'Illustration Only' frame are there to bring the lengths into a 0-1 range.. you wouldn't use those. Ensure the render output is linear, (set the Color Management to 'Raw'), and save to a floating-point format, probably, as you say, EXR, (in which case, as @susu has commented, color transforms will be bypassed.)

Answer 2

I think you could easily build a shader which calculates any relation between world position and camera position as well as orientation/direction. The shader node graph gives you the option to access the camera position/direction and the world position of any shading point. Additionally there are Vector Math nodes which help you to calculate whatever value you have in mind.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/input/camera_data.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/converter/vector_math.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/input/geometry.html

If you need more help on this I would ask you to elaborate on your issue with a small drawing so I can better understand which component of the depth you would like to see in the pass.